Angela Merkel's fight against Europe's far-Right begins at home

Leif-Erik Holm, top candidate for regional elections of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, campaigns in front of the Schwerin Castle, seat of the regional parliament, on September 1, 2016Credit:
JENS BUTTNER/AFP

The news that Angela Merkel’s party has been beaten in the German Chancellor’s own backyard by the populist Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) is being taken as yet another bellwether that the far-Right is once again ascendant in Europe.

The simple narrative runs that if the AfD can win even in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, where Mrs Merkel has her constituency, it must surely represent a serious threat to Germany democracy as we approach the next year’s federal election where Mrs Merkel is expected to seek a historic fourth term.

But that misses a fundamental point about the appeal of parties like the AfD, with its nasty, narrow mix of nativist anti-Muslim bigotry and barely coded white supremacism – which is that the more white and mono-cultural the electoral district, the better they perform.

The population of Meck-Pomm, as the locals calls this depressed corner of the former East Germany, is 97 per cent German-born and accepted just under 25,000 refugees out of the nearly one million that arrived in Germany last year – approximately 1.5 per cent of the state’s population.

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The fact that, with barely a refugee or a foreign face in sight, the AfD does so well – beating Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party into third place when the party didn’t exist last time these local polls were held – explains a lot about the essentially hollow nature of xenophobia.

It is much easier to scapegoat and scaremonger against entire races and religions when the rhetoric is not inconvenienced in any way by reality.

This is true across Europe – Hungary and Poland both have less than 0.2 per cent Muslim population, yet a recent Pew Research survey shows that the populations of these two whitest and Christian of European countries now hold the most virulently anti-migrant and anti-Muslim views.

The same phenomenon is observable in Britain, where Clacton-on-Sea, whose population is more than 97 per cent white became Ukip's only parliamentary constituency in 2015 – a town that has virtually no foreigners but, as I discovered this summer, lives in irrational fear of them.

All of which points to the both the limits and the dangers posed by parties like Ukip, AfD, the Freedom Party (FPO) in Austria or France’s National Front whose rhetoric is currently poisoning and paralysing European politics.

The limits are particularly clear in Germany where, because of that country’s history, the AfD has no chance of governing in state or national coalitions, because none of the centre-ground parties will get into bed with it.

This result is embarrassing for Mrs Merkel, but very far from fatal. Look closely at the Meck-Pomm results and you discover that the other parties – the ruling SPD, the Left and the Greens actually lost more ground (about 5 per cent) than Mrs Merkel’s ruling CDU.

Without a serious rival for the Chancellorship, Mrs Merkel remains hot favourite to run and win again in 2017, and this result doesn’t fundamentally change that.

But the result does serve as yet another warning - if it were needed - that the grievances that are fuelling the rise of nativist parties like AfD all across Europe need to be addressed, not ignored, or Europe’s spiral of dysfunction will only tighten.

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Political leaders weakened at home, as Mrs Merkel now is, are less able to take the decisions at a supra-national level (on migration, global trade and the Euro) that are necessary to create the economic growth needed to quiet the current populist upheaval.

Pandering to the far-Right is not the answer: the consequences of that is already to be glimpsed, darkly in France, where next year’s presidential contest could well come down to a face-off between Marine Le Pen and Nicolas Sarkozy who is currently doing a passable impression of her now-sidelined dad.

In both Germany and across Europe the polls are clear; the majority of people do not want to live in the world of the AfD or the National Front. Only concrete successes at home – tackling the nitty-gritty issues of housing, healthcare and schools where migration and austerity pinches – will give leaders like Mrs Merkel the political credibility to tackle head-on the scaremongering and empty promises of the populists.

The German chancellor, who admittedly squandered too much of that credibility with her ill thought-out refugee policy, is still the leader in Europe with the both the courage and the clout to do that.